With the crisis of refugees arriving in to Europe from Syria and other countries in Asia and Africa the topic of climate change, displacement and migration assumes a high level of attention. Much of the debate is characterised by prejudice rather than evidence. We should accept the obvious truism that humans have been moving for millennia for a variety of …
The Climate Vulnerable Forum Has Come of Age
(Originally published on The Daily Star here) The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) just held its high officials’ meeting in Manila under the chairmanship of the government of the Philippines where they prepared the Manila Paris Declaration to be formally adopted at a heads of government meeting of the CVF countries in Paris on November 30. They also agreed on a …
The Road to Paris: how can the world’s most vulnerable countries be heard?
(Originally posted on the IIED website here) With a month to go until the start of COP21, Saleemul Huq provides an insight into the perspectives of the Least Developed Countries ahead of the Paris climate talks, as part of a new series of video interviews for IIED. Least Developed Countries must use their “strength of numbers” if they are to …
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change – What can we expect?
(This article originally published here) Earlier this month in Bonn, Germany, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held its last round of talks to prepare the text for the Climate Change Summit to be held in December in Paris, France to finalise a new Paris Agreement at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21). The draft of the …
The 2015 Paris Climate Summit: Dilemma and Direction
(Article originally published here) Having attended all twenty conferences of parties (COPs) of the UN’s climate body over the years and now planning to be in Paris for the twenty-first in December, I am feeling ambivalent about the entire enterprise. Everything I hear about in the build-up seems to be a mixture of good news and bad news. On the one …
The Green Thread
(Article originally published here) On September 25, at the UN General Assembly in New York, government leaders will agree to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” as they sign on to the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — setting the global-development agenda for the next 15 years. It is good to see that climate action and …
Exclusion of ‘loss and damage’ would make Paris deal useless
(This article has been originally published on rtcc.org, available here) The UN’s climate body has kicked off its year of intensive work with a meeting this week in Geneva. The process will culminate in Paris in December, where world leaders hope to sign off a new agreement that will deal with all elements of global warming. The aim of this …
Climate negotiations on the road to Paris
(This article was originally published here) Geneva is the most important step this year for delivering a new global climate agreement in Paris The year 2015 is a critical year for global climate negotiations. The agreement adopted at the climate summit in Paris in December (COP21) will test the willingness of countries to act collectively to ensure an ambitious …
